Edible Apple

When Phil Schiller began showing off the iPhone 5, he conceded that making a phone thinner is typically not what you want to do when you’re trying to improve a device’s camera. But Apple’s vaunted engineering team put in a lot of work to create a camera that’s markedly better than the iPhone 4S.

Looking to gauge just how much better the iPhone 5 camera is, Gizmodo put it through the ringer and compared it to the 3S, the Galaxy S3 from Samsung, the HTC One X, and Nokia’s 41MP 808 PureView (ha!).

Overall, the iPhone 5 preformed exceptionally well, and thankfully one major area of improvement is in the photos it takes in low light settings.

Here is a comparison of low light photos taken with the iPhone 5 vs the iPhone 4.

Gizmodo explains the iPhone 5 low light advantage:

The iPhone 4S tops out at a maximum sensitivity of ISO 800, which just isn’t enough to get a properly exposed photo in a dark situation without flash. Apple’s greatly improved the image processing on the iPhone 5 such that the camera can now shoot up to a sensitivity of ISO 3200 while still ending up with less noise. This is a sea change. If you like taking photos in dark bars and you’re addicted to Apple’s iOS ecosystem, this upgrade is essential.

And here you can see the noticeable improvement in sharpness with the iPhone 5 over the iPhone 4S.

Head on over to Giz for the full breakdown of iPhone 5 comparison shots vs other smarpthones. The iPhone 5 doesn’t win every shootout, but it’s more than a capable competitor and is an obvious improvement over iPhone 4S photos.